Budget omnibus bills — let’s make a deal

Many observers expect this week’s federal budget to include deep spending cuts as the government strives to eliminate the deficit ahead of the 2015 election. If the last few budgets are any indication, it seems likely that the budget will be accompanied by omnibus budget implementation legislation. Despite the outcry triggered by last year’s two budget implementation bills — which ran to a dizzying 839 pages and amended dozens of statutes — the Harper government has shown no sign that it intends to curb its use of omnibus bills.

This means we’re likely in for a few weeks of opposition handwringing over the decline of Parliament. Indeed, we have already seen a preview of this criticism in an iPolitics article by two former Department of Finance officials. We may also see new protests by the Idle No More movement, which emerged partly in response to provisions in last year’s second omnibus bill that stripped federal protection from thousands of lakes and rivers without consulting aboriginal peoples affected by the changes.

Along with taking its case against omnibus budget bills to the public, the opposition likely will once more make the case to Speaker Andrew Scheer that omnibus bills constitute a violation of parliamentary privilege. The opposition will ask that the legislation either be withdrawn and reintroduced as separate bills or split up before coming to a vote. Given the rulings that Scheer has made on past omnibus legislation and the precedents set by many of his predecessors, it seems unlikely that he will agree to do either.

Another option for the opposition would be a repeat of last year’s filibuster, which saw them introduce thousands of amendments to the budget implementation bill. Despite the fact that Prime Minister Harper leads a majority government, making the passage of the bill inevitable, each amendment required an individual vote, which delayed the bill’s progress. While a filibuster helps back up the opposition’s public relations campaign, it does little to address the real concern: that omnibus legislation allows the government to evade meaningful scrutiny of the bill’s provisions by the House.

A more workable approach might be for the opposition to build on the agreement it reached with the government last year, which saw part of the second omnibus bill — concerning the reform of the MP pension system — broken out into a separate bill, which was swiftly passed. Perhaps the opposition could ask for the least contentious parts of the budget implementation bill to be broken out into separate bills, which could be passed quickly, in exchange for more thorough scrutiny of the more controversial provisions.

The opposition also could introduce a motion that would see the House adopt the Senate procedure, which allows multiple committees to examine the provisions of a single bill. That way, instead of having the House finance committee scrutinize the entire omnibus bill — as was the case with all of the Harper government’s budget implementation bills — each House committee would examine the provisions of the bill that fall within its jurisdiction.

This would help avoid absurd situations like the one which followed the abolition of the office of Inspector General of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), a watchdog charged with ensuring that CSIS’ activities comply with the law, which was part of last year’s first omnibus bill. The elimination of that office, the first substantive change to the CSIS Act in the agency’s history, was not the subject of any hearings by the House public safety and national security committee, the jurisdiction of which covers CSIS.

While undoubtedly it would be difficult for the opposition to get the Harper government to agree to these changes, they would strike a balance between maintaining the expediency in passing budget legislation that the government desires and restoring the House’s ability to properly scrutinize that legislation. This is something that neither filibusters nor handwringing can hope to achieve.

Patrick Baud studies political science at the University of Toronto, Victoria College. In May, he will present a paper on the elimination of the CSIS Inspector General and its consequences for CSIS accountability at Ryerson University.

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